A Dragon From the Desert, page 20
“There are modifiers that you can work into a spell that help maintain it with a minimum of effort, but yes, I am still casting the spell and others that I maintain.”
“That must be difficult,” I said. I thought about her strange silences, and the times when she seemed lost in thought. I wondered if she was casting spells then or maintaining them.
“It comes with practise. Over time you learn more runes and more modifiers, and your mind learns to accommodate them.”
“Accommodate?”
“Eldrak is not a language meant for humans. Our minds have difficulty dealing with it. The Old Ones and some of the other Elder Races could use it with a fluency we will never have.”
“I do not understand,” I said.
“And as usual you don’t need to, at this stage. You just need to believe me when I tell you it is so. The language of magic does not come naturally to humans as it does to certain other races. It can drive us mad and it poses other dangers.”
“It seems that everything connected with magic does that.”
“There’s no need to sound so sour, boy. It does not change the way the world is. If you want to be a mage just be grateful for the fact that you are born with the gift to use the power at all.”
“Are you?” It was an impertinent question, but her tone irritated me.
“I am. Being a wizard is not without its problems, drawbacks and responsibilities but there is nothing I would rather be.” Her voice was utterly sincere. I thought about the way she could wield power and what that made her, and I could understand why. Another question occurred to me.
“What happens if someone who cannot wield the power reads one of the runes?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether they have any sensitivity to magic. Some of them will feel something. Some will be altered by the experience. It might drive them mad, as it drives some mages mad. In most cases, they will see only a complex pattern.”
“Wait a minute– looking at runes can drive mages mad?”
“Yes. If you attempt to master a rune that your mind is not yet capable of accepting, you might damage it. The same might happen if you try to master a rune that is antipathetic to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just as certain mages have a gift for comprehending certain types of magic, certain mages have the opposite. We say that certain types of runes are antipathetic to them. They will always struggle to master those types of magic and will never perform it as well as those who are gifted or who simply do not have the problem. I am antipathetic to healing magic myself. I have never been able to go beyond the simplest of curative spells.”
I thought about it for a moment. “But you are gifted at destruction. There would seem to be a balance there.”
“That is not always the way these things go but in my case you are correct. You are not the first to point it out either.” She saw the disappointment on my face and grinned. “You are the first to do so after so little schooling though. You are gifted, boy, no doubt about that.”
I considered what she had told me. It was a warning and an obvious one. I was not to try and go beyond certain limits. I had no idea whether it was true or not. Instinct told me it was, but that might not make it any less self-serving on her part.
“So I am limited to learning the most basic runes,” I said.
“Hark at the child,” she said. “Yes, and just as well for all our sakes. There are other dangers than insanity if you try a spell beyond your strength. Assuming you can force it into your mind, you can drain yourself of all power, burn yourself out when you try and cast it. You can attract the attention of certain entities it is better not to. They come uncalled when such a spell runs out of control, like sharks summoned by blood in the water. If that happens you are lost and most likely those around you as well.”
“I will be possessed.”
“Yes.”
“It seems to me that there is much that is right in what the Holy Inquisitors say.”
“I would not dream of denying it, boy. Now, if you are done with your own inquisiting, can we proceed with the teaching?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Runes are divided up into levels of complexity by those who know. The simplest are known as runes of the First Order of Magnitude. The most complex currently known belong to the Fifth Order.”
“Currently known?”
“There are tales and rumours of spells going all the way to the Tenth Order and beyond. Those are spells that could shake the world. Even Fifth Order spells are potent beyond the measure of most mages. A wizard who masters them can destroy armies, travel hundreds of leagues without passing through the lands in between, bend the weather to his will.”
“Can you do that?”
She shook her head. “I have neither the power nor the talent. With some effort I can wield spells of the Fourth Order but that is the limit of my strength, if not my understanding.”
“Why do you mention strength and understanding?”
“Because both are limits on a mage. It is possible to comprehend a spell without having the strength to cast it. It is perhaps possible to have the strength to cast a spell but not be able to understand it. We do not really know.”
“Because someone in that position would not be able to learn such powerful spells in the first place?”
“Precisely so. It’s something that every wizard comes up against, those limits. Either your mind or your power will fail you.”
“Is it not possible to increase those? My brother was weak until he started lifting sacks of stones. Now he is as strong as I.”
“That is what a great deal of magical training is about,” she said softly. “We build our strength in the Power. We increase our flexibility of mind. We do it through practise and sometimes we get increases in both for reasons that no one quite understands. Just as we can lose the gift through lack of practise, ageing, injury, burnout. Sometimes we lose the power without ever finding out why.”
That was a frighteningly long list of ways to lose your power before ever you started. I swallowed and I looked at her. “I am ready to begin.”
Her eyes crinkled at the corners. The makeup showed small cracks. Her too-red lips drew back to reveal her small predator’s teeth. “I am glad to hear it. Look at the rune. Follow the patterns. Concentrate on them.”
I did so. I squinted at them in the moonlight. I waited expectantly to feel the glow of power within myself.
Nothing happened.
I frowned and concentrated harder, tracing the pattern with my eyes, trying to find my way through the labyrinth, to return to the place I had found before.
Nothing happened.
I ground my teeth and glared at the stone. I focused all my will on it, seeking to draw a response from it. My jaw tightened. I felt the muscles strain in my neck.
Nothing happened.
My face flushed with anger. My nostrils flared. My fists clenched.
My mistress laughed. I glared at her.
“That won’t help,” she snapped. “Give your attention to the rune.”
I turned my eyes back to the stone. I stared and stared and stared. Minutes dragged by. The fire burned low. I was aware of my breathing rasping in and out of my lungs, of my heart pounding at my chest. Sweat dripped on my brow now.
I slammed the stone down. “It is not working.”
“Apparently,” she said.
“Is it the same stone?”
She raised an eyebrow, reached out, picked up the stone. A heartbeat later it glowed. Light flooded from the lines of the rune. It picked out the pattern, magnified on the ground around us.
“It is the same stone.”
“What is wrong with it?”
“Nothing. It is exactly as it was on the night I tested you.”
“Then why is it not working?”
She put her chin on her fist and looked at me. “Why do you think?”
“I don’t know.” I had to force the words out of my mouth. I felt like lashing out at her, but I knew how foolish that would be. Unfair as well. This was not her fault.
“It is me.”
She made a small gesture with her left hand indicating I should continue.
“I cannot tap its power.”
“The stone has no power. That must come either from within you or from the surrounding aether. How did you tap it then?”
“I don’t know.”
“And yet you did. What was different?”
“I was afraid. I had no idea what was expected of me. Something happened but I don’t know why.”
“And there is the nub of your problem.”
“My problem?”
“You are the one seeking to learn. I already know how to cast this spell.”
“You are supposed to be my teacher.”
“And I am trying to teach you, but you must learn!”
“What must I learn?”
“To control your temper and not to snap at me, for one thing, boy.”
“I apologise, mistress, but I am frustrated.”
“As is only natural and as you will be a thousand times as you try to master the Art. The first thing a mage must learn is patience. The power comes in its own time. Not in yours.”
“But it came before.”
“And it will come again.”
“What is wrong with me?”
“Nothing. You are seeing something that happens to every apprentice mage. Something that apparently not even you are immune to.”
“And what would that be, mistress?”
“Usually the first time anyone works a spell is when they are under a huge strain. Sometimes a young witch will burn down a house when her virtue is threatened. A young wizard will call down lightning on robbers without knowing how. You were frightened the night we first met. And you were under strain. And the power had been building in you for a long time without an outlet.”
“And you put me under pressure,” I said, seeing it for the first time. “And forced me to tap into it.”
She shook her head. “You put yourself under pressure.”
“And I did again just now, and nothing happened.”
“You tried to pull the power to you, to make the rune obey your command. You tried to will it so with your conscious mind.”
I nodded.
“A great deal of magic is not performed with the conscious mind. It is performed on a much different level by a part that does not think at all. It simply does.”
“I see,” I said, although I did not. I stared into the distance, wondering whether the ridgeline I was looking at was real or simply an illusion woven by Mistress Iliana.
“The part of your mind that can touch the aether is dormant, asleep. You are not afraid. It has no reason to reach out and you do not know how to make it.”
“Can you show me how to do that?”
“I can point you in that direction, but every wizard must find out what works best for them by themselves.”
I glared at her. It seemed everything she said was an evasion. I wondered what she could really teach me. She laughed again.
“I looked at my master the same way when he said such things. I learned. You can to.”
“I hope so.”
“You will. You are merely encountering the first of many obstacles. There are far worse ones ahead. If you give up at the first hurdle you are no use to me.”
There was a threat implicit in those words. “You said that if I do not learn then I will become a danger to myself and those around me.”
“There is a solution to that.”
“You will kill me?”
“That would be a last resort. Before that I would try and burn the power out of you.”
“Try?”
“It does not always work, particularly with ones such as you, in whom the power is naturally strong. The side-effects of doing so are not good either. It might be better for you if you died.”
“Being a mage does not seem to be a particularly pleasant or easy profession.”
“No one ever said it would be.”
All this discussion was doing nothing but frighten and frustrate me. I gave my attention back to the stone. I focused my attention on it. I strained. I did my best to relax. I tried and tried and tried but nothing I could do would make the power come.
Eventually, Mistress Iliana must have grown bored with my silence and my straining and my sullen looks. She said, “It is late, boy, and we travel tomorrow. Go to sleep.”
A wave of tiredness passed over me, and I did. Such was her power. There were no bad dreams.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The sun flared over the eastern mountains while the camp came awake around us. Men headed to clumps of boulders to do their business. The cook lit his fire and prepared his porridge. I collected food for myself and Mistress Iliana. My head still buzzed with what she had told me the night before.
I recalled what she had done last. She had sent me to sleep and my sleep had been dreamless and for that I was thankful, but I did not like it. I made me feel weak and helpless and completely in her power. I supposed it was meant to. I had no way of fighting back. I did not have any idea how to and the only way I was going to learn was by listening to her. Not that my efforts had achieved much.
I was so preoccupied I paid little attention to the rest of the company. The bad atmosphere of the previous day had receded. There was no muttering. No one tried to trip me. The cook handed me the bowls without comment and gave me two mugs of watered wine. I collected a bit of sausage for Red.
I looked around to see if I could see Ghoran or Jay or Big Samael but there was no sign of them. There was no sign of Todd and his friends either. Or Ruth. It seemed it was too early for company of any sort.
I took the food back to Mistress Iliana. She nodded and returned to reading the book. I was tempted to ask her what was in it but the look of concentration on her brow told me that would not be a good idea. I sat down near her and ate in silence, studying the sky as it brightened.
People think the Bleak Lands are lifeless, but they are not. The creatures that live there are sparse, but there are many different sorts. The plants that grow are not exactly edible– they are spiny and sometimes poisonous, but they can be lovely in their own way.
You sometimes get the impression that the denizens of the Bleak Lands hate life but that is not true. They are simply determined to hold on to it themselves with tooth and claw and spine. There is a loveliness to the land that grows on you the longer you live there, and I spent the most formative years of my life amid it.
I watched the birds hover on thermals, and I knew that they were observing me just as closely to see if I stopped moving and might provide them with a meal. I had noticed the same thing often enough when watching my father’s goats.
I played with Red and thought about magic and Ruth until it was time to depart. There was a mystery about what she had said last night that I had only been distracted from by Mistress Iliana’s attempts to teach me. Needless to say, it did nothing to diminish the attraction I felt.
As the road rose towards the mountains there seemed to be less dust. I certainly spent less time rubbing it from my eyes and breathing it in. Now all I had to get used to it was the smell of horse piss and dung as it was dropped on the road by the cavalry ahead of us. My mistress continued to read, and I guided the wagon along the road. It was easy at this point. Just follow the ruts. It had been a bright dawn and it was a glorious sunny day. It was not quite as hot as it was in the lands below. By noon it was hot enough to make us sweat, but the air did not shimmer and I was not that sense of being oppressed by the sun that was so easy to come by in the lowlands.
Of course, the horses found it harder climbing upslope as did the soldiers. Nonetheless they seemed to appreciate the lower temperature. It offset their complaints about going uphill.
Red scampered around, crawling all over me. My thoughts drifted between my conversation with Ruth last night and my failure to work magic. Only gradually did I become aware of the changes taking place around me.
The route took us towards a gap in the mountains. I noticed even at a distance that there was something odd about the shape of the pass we were heading towards. As the day wore on it became clearer what exactly was strange.
Two mighty figures loomed before us, hundreds of feet high and carved from the bones of the mountains themselves. They wore armour of a peculiar sort. Each figure wore a breastplate inscribed with an elder sign and a kilt made of leather straps. High greaves covered their legs. Similar armour covered their arms. Each held an oval shield that covered half of their body. In the other hand they held a lance tipped with crystal. Those gems looked tiny attached to those monstrous weapons but must have been at least the size of my father’s house. Even in the daylight they shimmered. The statues stood like sentinels looking down on the pass. They made me feel like an insect. I had no doubt that that was exactly what they were supposed to do.
Mistress Iliana looked up from her book and said, “the Sentinels. The Solari guardians of Asurean’s Gate. We are making good time.”
There was nothing of the awe that I felt in her voice. It was as if she had seen the Sentinels many times and become inured to their majesty. I stared and stared and stared. If the route had not been so straight and the beasts so docile we would undoubtedly have gone off the road.
The eyes of those monstrous stone figures glared down at me and I felt as if I was being judged and not a merciful way. I knew then that those huge statues had been set there is a warning to those who would challenge the might of the Solari emperors. They were a statement of power. More than that they were a statement of mastery. Who would defy those who could make such a thing? Who would dare face the might of an empire that chopped through mountains and set its seal on them?
“Close your mouth,” Mistress Iliana said. “Unless you want flies to buzz into it.”
“Mistress,” I said very softly. “I have never seen such…”
My voice failed me, and I simply could not find the words to describe what I was feeling. She closed the book with a snap. “Everybody feels that way the first time they see those statues. It’s what they’re meant to do. Look closely and you can see the enchantments woven about them.”
